


Five Hundred White Carnations

by CrumblingAsh



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bruce Banner Has Issues, Canonical Child Abuse, Clint Barton Has Issues, Domestic Violence, Everyone Has Issues, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, Mother's Day, Natasha Romanov Has Issues, No Thor this time, Over Left 4 Dead, Steve Rogers Has Issues, Team Bonding, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Has Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-10
Updated: 2014-06-10
Packaged: 2018-02-04 03:26:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1764085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrumblingAsh/pseuds/CrumblingAsh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, what should have been promised gold in childhood is nothing more than flaking, cheap paint, leaving a ring of molded green against the skin it had hugged, the only memory left a stain. It's not loved, but it's not hated, either. Because at one time it had meant something.</p><p>(Belated Mother's Day fic)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tony

* * *

 

Her eyes had been the color of the liquid amber she would drink every morning.

But their shape had given form to his.

There had been nights – a multitude of nights – where she had snuck into his room, quiet as a breeze, and had curled herself around him, holding him to her chest as she would run so very thin fingers through his hair, crooning soft words to chase away the harsh hatred his father had whipped upon them both. Nights where he had snuggled as deeply into her as he could get, trembling and goose-bumped and safe, inhaling her scent of scotch and lilac as he would fall asleep to the softness of her voice (never knowing that it would be the tiny puffs of his breath against her neck, the total love and acceptance to which he would always embrace her, that would lull her into her own slumber). Those nights had been bitter and perfect, feeding his memory of affection to offset the memory of rejection and pain.

But her eyes had been the color of the liquid amber she would drink every morning, at first from a glass and then later straight from the bottle. And soon it had become the bottle that she cradled against her chest every night, replacing him, tucked within her own bed (separate from his father) or buried in the corner of the kitchen, eyes blackened with mascara that her tears had forced to run. And her gentle whispers and loving words had become biting snipes and piercing comparisons to his father and, “just go away, Tony” _I don’t want you anymore_.

He remembers the warmth of her arms and the beauty of her laughter and the fond memories of nights where she would hold him.

But he remembers the color of her eyes most.

He never speaks of her.


	2. Bruce

* * *

 

She would make cookies every Monday after school, fresh and gooey and just for the two of them to share. “Monday’s are hard,” she would say, “but this one’s over. So let’s have some cookies to celebrate.”

She would smile at him across the table through the bruises on her cheeks or eyes or neck, keep her sleeves firmly pulled down as she passed him the plate, and pretend like everything was normal as he would slowly die inside.

Because her pain should have been his; her pain was his fault. Because his father had never hit his mom before he was born. Because she had always stepped in front of the fists that had been trying to rain down on him.

If he could forget the bruises – the molted mixture of brown, yellow, purple, red – could just focus on only her smile, on the pride in her eyes when he would show her his report cards, on the days they would go shopping for food or clothes or nothing in particular, on how _beautiful_ and _kind_ and _loving_ she had been, he could almost pretend

_That he isn’t sitting on the kitchen floor, cradling her head in his lap as her blood seeps into the fabric of his jeans, coats his hands as his tears splash down onto her broken face as she stares up at him, unfocused, her mouth moving to form words and only tiny, ragged gasps escaping. His father’s gone, run, and Bruce doesn’t know how to fix this Mom, please!_

The Hulk never stirs within him at her memory. He hates her, _he hates her,_ for leaving him, but there’s no rage in the hatred to set off his monster.

He would give anything to hug her, if just one more time.


	3. Clint

* * *

 

 

He remembers she had golden hair that dimmed like the sun behind clouds. He remembers her soft skin and calloused palms, the way they felt against his skin as they swept affectionately across his cheek or ruffled through his hair. He remembers her strength, working just as hard as his father to provide for him and Barney and the baby that grew in the gentle sloping swell of her stomach.

She had been able to see _everything_ – he and his brother could get away with nothing around her. Somehow she always knew …

He remembers she had looked _pretty_ in the dresses she had been forced to wear when she had grown too big for even his father’s pants – the scowl across her forehead as the wind would toss the long skirt because it made her look “dainty”. It had made him smile.

He remembers the sound of crunching metal and the scent of blood and her lifeless _no longer seeing_ eyes staring at him from the front seat due to the grotesque twisted curve of her neck.

And he remembers, because it’s impossible to forget, the nights in the orphanage where he sobbed because the caretakers _“Your mother is dead, Clinton.”_ had believed in being blunt to children. And he remembers the few weeks or months, maybe, where Barney  had tried, because Clint was still young, was still his baby brother (here’s how you tie your shoes, here’s how you button your pants, here’s how you wash your face) before finally exploding, “I’m not your mother, Clint! You don’t have one anymore! She left you! She’s gone! Do it yourself!” (I’m alone) and had taken off (and Clint had followed because who else did he have, anymore?).

Mothers take their children to circuses and buy them treats and hold their hands and comfort their tears and he _hates it._

His hair has dimmed to be the same color as hers. He keeps it short, just enough for it to _exist_ but not enough for it to be overwhelming, to be a constant reminder. He can’t help his eyes, help that he has seen _everything_ (since she died), but he turns it into an asset, makes it a weapon, a survival she would never have used. He does everything himself.

He doesn’t need her.


	4. Natasha

* * *

 

She has a picture that isn’t hers and the knowledge of her first kill.

The photograph is black-and-white, an attempt to be formal or because of lack of color, she doesn’t know, but it does nothing to hide the perfectly outlined face so similar to her own. Large, round eyes with a spark of something she doesn’t recognize.

This is her first kill. This woman she had stolen life from simply by being born.

She doesn’t even know what her voice sounded like, or how she walked, or what it was she had done wrong that caused her death at the hands of _her._

And so she stares at the picture, an hour every day, perhaps more, frowning and confused, trying to figure it out, and it sets rage into her father’s eyes as he snatches it from her hands, crumples it and throws it to the floor.

 _“Love is for children, Natalia,”_ he snarls, and she nods with a blank look, because she knows this, has always known this, but for some reason still snags the photograph back into her possession when he turns back to his vodka and her brother.

She carries it with her for years after, through the Red Room and the KGB and all of the red in her ledger and finally to SHIELD where Natalia dies and Natasha takes her place. She holds it in her hands at night or in the morning as if it’s a towel that can soak up and wash away the blood she’s drowned the world with, where she’s hidden and no one can see, staring with the same disconnect she ever has.

You can’t love a stranger, and love is for children.

She's just curious.


	5. Steve

* * *

 

 

Every night, she had held him in her arms when it had been too hard to breathe, surrounded him in the warmth of her body and her life when the chill of the air had been too much for his frail body to take, recited to him prayers and passages from the Bible when he became so faint, so shallow, that he had convinced himself he would die, sure he had convinced her too.

He had been (is) her spitting image, brilliant golden hair and eyes as vivid as darkening vibrant sky. She would tell him stories of angels and he would ask (always ask),  “Mama, are you an angel?” and it seems silly (now), but she had always stopped her story, smiling down at him with such love that it made his heart thud extra hard, and firmly tell him, “No, Steven. But God chose me to give life to one.” On _that_ , he had never really believed her, but it had always made him smile, filling his fevered dreams with images of him flying through the clouds with strong, elegant white wings, his mother beside him with wings of her own, no matter what she said.

She had been the strength he had never had, as if God really had split him into two pieces – himself and her. She had kept him alive, kept him sane with books and stories and art supplies that had not really been able to afford but had anyway. She had claimed to not be an angel, but her nurse’s uniform and her unyielding dedication fed more to his imagination than even the stories of the Bible did, sometimes. Sarah, of the Bible, of God. An angel.

Her death had shocked him so deeply he hadn’t felt anything until he walked into his (only his, now) home and closed the door on Bucky. His beautiful, vibrant, personification of life mother, without breath in the ground, covered in dirt-made-mud by the rain, resting beside the dad he had never met and that she had so strongly cherished the memory of. He had walked into his home, closed the door, and there had been nothing. No sounds from the kitchen, no rushing around to get to the hospital. Even the rasps of struggled breathing he had come to be soothed by over the past few months were absent. Gone, because they hadn’t been needed anymore.

He had been alone.

And for the first time, and burst of strength had washed through him like a tidal wave, all energy that burned him from the inside, and without thinking had swung his fist into the wall. And then again, and again.

“Why?!” He had raged, at the wall, at his mother, at God. _“Why?! Why?!”_  And whether it had been the wall that had cracked first, or his skin, or his bone, the door had flown open and Bucky had caught him before he had been able to swing again, held him as they both hit the floor.

 _She wanted to be with Dad more than with me_ he had kept repeating into Bucky’s shoulder (God, he doesn’t mean it. That’s wrong, he can’t mean it). But he had repeated it all the same.


	6. May 11th

* * *

 

 

Steve’s quiet on the common room couch as he comes across another advertisement for an elegant Mother’s Day gift on the tablet he uses to read the news. He lingers on it just a little too long before he flicks his finger on the screen for the next page that he barely gets halfway through before closing the page, opening a new screen to reveal a half-completed idea of a new uniform. Without thinking, he unlocks the stylus and sketches the wings back onto his cowl.  

Bruce is silent, eyes closed and lips slightly parted for breath as he sits on the room’s black recliner. He looks to all the world as if he is mediating, relaxing to gain control, but his back is tense, his breaths just an inch more forceful than usual. It’s morning, but there’s a strong, recognizable scent of baking chocolate chip cookies coming from the kitchen.

Clint sits perched atop the shelving closest to the window, his eyes flicking over the Manhattan skyline, seeing something else, his hair freshly cut.

Natasha, too, sits on the common room couch with thick book on her lap of which she hasn’t turned the page of in the past seven minutes. Her left hand is gently clenched in a cradling position, the faintest outline of something white and grey barely visible in the crack of her skin.

Tony stands in the entryway, inches off the elevator, and for once there isn’t  a glass of scotch in his hand.

It’s May 11th. Nationally recognized as Mother’s Day, and these people he’s invited to live in his tower, his _team,_ if they had to be called that, look about as alive as he does.

He knows their stories; he’s hacked his way past the limits of every file to get deeper. He knows of Natasha’s photograph and Steve’s wings and Bruce’s cookies and Clint’s constant hair appointments. He doesn’t _care_ even, exactly. They’re just… they’re mopey. In his tower. Depressed. He doesn’t _do_ depressed.

(And okay, yes, fine, maybe he gets it. Or he definitely gets it. Hates seeing it in anything other than the mirror and hates that, too).

“I’ve successfully rendered Left 4 Dead to be multiplayer without online play!” He announces grandly, grinning as Bruce’s eyes snap open and Clint’s head whips around, to Steve’s confused, cocked head and Natasha’s raised (impressed? He’ll go with impressed) eyebrow. “I’ve even made it for up to six players for whenever Thor gets back, which means characters from both games. I know, I know. It’s amazing. Extra controllers, too. And to celebrate yet another stroke of my genius, we’re playing it. Right now. JARVIS.” Obediently, the television flicks on, not to channels with Mother’s Day commercials, but straight to the gaming screen, music already playing.

Clint’s the first to join in, jumping down perfectly with a grin on his face as he darts forward – shooting games are his favorite. Bruce is next, doubt overridden by the curiosity of Tony’s hack and the changes it means (plus, the guy’s a total sucker for anything zombie, Tony knows and exploits this always). Natasha sighs, casting a look from Bruce and Clint to Steve to Tony before she closes her book, subtly tucking the photograph into her pocket before holding out her hand for a controller, not getting up. Steve’s last, also not getting up, confusion warring with melancholy on his face as he blinks at the billionaire.

“Um, Left for Dead?” He questions, voice just shy of wounded, and Tony winces (because oops. Maybe not the best named game to be playing today) but rolls with it, pulling the tablet from Steve’s hands, saving the work before he can complain and replacing it with a controller.

“Today, Steven, all we are doing is killing zombies. Lots and lots of zombies. Preferably with chainsaws, but shotguns are also acceptable,” he states firmly. From behind, Clint cackles and Natasha snorts. “I’ll even be a nice guy and show you how to work the controls. Let’s see if there’s something out there you’re _not_ good at.”

“…Ok?” But the confusion in Steve’s eyes is slowly being replaced with determination. Challenges against Tony always get him.

And Tony moves to sit between him and Natasha, Bruce getting up while they argue over campaign choice (they decide to start from the beginning) to get the cookies (bringing back out five plates loaded with them). It’s May 11th, nationally recognized to be Mother’s Day. And somewhere Pepper is with her mom, and SHIELD agents are visiting theirs (or not), and commercials are playing endless advertisements and the world is filled with reminders and Tony’s not drunk and they’re eating Bruce’s cookies and Natasha has her picture and Clint’s hair is still cut and Steve probably still wants to continue sketching the wings.

But they’re going to spend the day in virtual blood and gore killing zombies and eating cookies and not buying flowers or thinking about mothers.

(They always think about their mothers).


End file.
